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Four marriages for Ralph! According to Wikipedia, he was also linked to high profile romances with Ava Gardner, Liz Taylor and Janet Leigh. Now those are the love letters I want to read!
Sharyn, LOL at the story about the Bose speakers. Apparently you’ve got a little electronics elf leaving you presents! The elf has good taste if they’re leaving you Bose anything!
The Great Courses CDs were something I used to see quite frequently when I was a regular at library sales. I find them so interesting because I would think at this point most of the material is available online in one form or another, and it’s not like they are packaged in a special way like certain collectible DVD or CD sets. But there is usually decent value in physical media in any form when it is comprehensive, especially if it’s a complete set.
Christine, I love both of those sales. If you remember, how long did you have those dishes listed and did you do any fiddling with repricing or promoted listings or just set and forget?
The orange/red contrast on that bedding is really visually striking and it’s good to know the Garnet Hill brand is high quality and not just colorful. Amazing to find something like that for $1!
One of the best things about reselling is finding these cool gifts for other people (or yourself) while you go about your regular scavenging and buying.
Hey @ChristineR, I’m so sorry to hear about your health problems. I hope you are feeling better and have been able to develop a system to sell what you can without too much mental/physical stress. If there are any areas where you get stuck trying to figure out how to manage things while you’re still less than 100%, please type/talk away in one of these posts. I think we’ve all dealt with managing our reselling businesses and life getting in the way of that, and it’s amazing how many times I read someone’s post and it helps me deal with a problem that felt impossible or unsolvable.
Be safe, and be well.
Trying to keep inventory moving the last few weeks, and I’ve found that I have a really nice routine with eBay. Take some pictures during the day, list at night. I do my regular buying and organizing for the trading card business mostly in the evenings and late night, leaving longer stretches of time for myself most days.
It can be hard to find consistent time off when you work for yourself, and even more when you enjoy the work. There’s always something else to do! It’s nice to feel like the routine I have this week works better for me than my routine last week, or last month, or last year. I did a lot of organizing and culling throughout the spring and summer, and sometimes it felt endless. I could still do more of that! I’m staring at a few bins of stuff as I write this. But I will take a few pictures after I click submit, and maybe a few more this afternoon after I’ve cooked a nice lunch and spent some good quality time out in the sunshine. I’ve made a lot of progress this year. Even on days where nothing much is selling, or days where I don’t feel great mentally, I can see visible signs of my progress and that feels nice.
A lot of times building your reselling business is a matter of finding the areas where you can grow each week. Build pipelines, stay consistent, be patient, be flexible and keep learning.
9/22/2024 to 9/28/2024
Total listings: 342 (down from 360 two weeks ago)
New listings this week: 34
Items sold: 26 — 8 via best offer, 13 via seller initiated offer, 12 via advertising
Gross sales: $1338.07 (down 42% from one year ago)
Net sales: $781.36 (down 48% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $51.46 (up 32% from one year ago)
I love how you have a few different irons in the fire, so if you strike out one week on yard sales, you have all these other different ways you can pick up inventory.
It’s interesting (but not surprising) that a serious collector would have fakes mixed in. But it makes perfect sense. It’s not like he (or anyone) would have a drawer labeled this is the fake junk for going out!
I found the Queen Victoria Unique Collection of Postal Stationery listing and I’m just as confused as you are. It’s always odd to me when you get sellers who are clearly pros (complex listing template, thousands of feedback) and they make listings where it’s not clearly what exactly you’re buying. I mean…I love it. I’ve built a lot of my inventory this way. But it’s also a bizarre quirk of eBay.
That intermatic time switch is such an interesting sale to me — my local Goodwills are all terrible, but I’m sure they must put stuff like this on the shelves. I’d never know it was valuable without your posts. Just looks like a thing in a box to me.
What makes a well made shoe (or any clothing item really) stick out to you? Level of craftsmanship? Quality of the material? Unique brand/logo/size? I’m sure there must be plenty of stuff which looks valuable but there is just no demand.
The forum seems to fix its access issues if I just wait a day or two and do a couple captchas the next time I log in, but if it happens again I’ll definitely send them an email.
I appreciate the heads up on the Maxsold auction. None of it struck me as worth the trip, as it all looked relatively high production numbers / low value for me, but it’s interesting to see that stuff out in the wild, so to speak. I’ve been checking Maxsold auctions every so often since I signed up for them a few months back. Some of the auctions have some really interesting items. Others seem more like an online yard sale, like there is one guy in my town who does a yard sale like every few weeks. One of these days, maybe I will go talk to him and find out his deal. I’m always curious about people who sell like that. But I would bet that he’s not really selling much of anything at all.
There are two Amazon reviews for Clarke’s W. Shakespeare’s Actual Nottebook — the low review says “Not nearly as funny as the author thinks it is” and the high review suggests “a refreshing take on Shakespeare.”
Who to believe? Zut alors!
Wow, thanks for linking that article Jay. Very interesting! I have to assume the buyer paid the equivalent of a house payment for that amount of cards and memorabilia — then again, the buyer pool which could handle a purchase of this size must be very small.
The examples given throughout the article are strange. Like the autographed baseballs in the beginning of the article? Stan Musial signed a ton of stuff before he died in 2013. A signed Musial ball sells for like $50. Maybe $100 if it’s authenticated? Same for Bob Feller. Willie Mays is more…but there are a ton of Mays fakes out there, too.
As far as the cards go, I’m sure there are plenty of valuable cards in there but also thousands (millions, even) worth pennies. In those thousands of Jordan cards and Kobe cards and LeBron cards, there are certainly dozens of common base cards, or cards with dinged corners which would drop the resale value significantly.
There are boxes and boxes of cards that are the ones with uniform pieces, bat pieces, signed pieces, and we haven’t even gone through that,” Mr. Wieder said. “Some of that stuff could be worth a fortune. We don’t know.
I can say with confidence that most of the cards in those boxes are worth $10 or less. That’s just the reality of autographed cards and memorabilia cards over the last 30+ years. Most players do not have a long athletic career, so a generation after they’ve retired, their autographs are only worth a few bucks with exceptions for rare sets or cards with other unique features.
Some of the other items pictured and described are valuable and unique. But the picture of the collection as a whole looks like an insane hoard of 80s and 90s cards from the junk wax era. There is just no demand for the vast majority of those types of cards, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
The buyer says at the end of the article that he doesn’t even want to sell anything! He wants to do a traveling exhibit, which seems…incredibly unrealistic, for any number of reasons. Or maybe he’ll do a podcast? He rented an empty antique store just to store the whole collection. His “potential business partners” include the former head of ESPN, John Skipper.
This is the only internet presence I can find from the buyer’s card company, besides a Facebook page of the same name with 23 likes and a podcast interview from last year. If I had tens of thousands of dollars (millions?) to blow on a massive card collection, I probably wouldn’t fuss around selling on eBay either. But one of my goals was to make a website documenting my finds, it doesn’t cost that much to hire someone to make something better than a free WordPress site. No offense, WordPress!
I’ll be curious to see if this guy starts his own card company in the next couple years where you can buy mystery packs (with a small chance of pulling something valuable) from this “once in a lifetime” collection — these are called repack products, and (as you can probably guess) I am not a fan because they are mostly full of cards that no one really wants. That’s my working theory about what is going on here.
Maybe I’m just too cynical?
9/8/2024 to 9/14/2024
Total listings: 360 (up from 347 two weeks ago)
New listings this week: 39
Items sold: 33 — 18 via best offer, 8 via seller initiated offer, 17 via advertising
Gross sales: $1414.16 (down 20% from one year ago)
Net sales: $858.97 (down 19% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $42.85 (up 0.3% from one year ago)
I had sales in seven different categories this week. My most common is sports trading card lots 41% followed by trading card singles at 35%, but I am starting to see some consistency in getting a few items a week from other categories. Signed bats and jerseys are my most common, for now, but we’ll see how the next few months go. I’ve got plenty of cool stuff to list and have been organizing my time better. Love to see results from putting in the hard work!
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I’m happy with how my store is trending as summer winds down. I worked hard the first half of this year to get my entire reselling business (both eBay and my card consignment sales) much more organized. I’ve always struggled with death piles and letting things get too cluttered. But something clicked for me this year. It’s still a daily battle, but it feels like one I’m winning. I’m excited to see how this pays off in Q4 and beyond.
8/25/2024 to 8/31/2024
Total listings: 357 (up from 347 last week)
New listings this week: 45
Items sold: 31 — 16 via best offer, 8 via seller initiated offer, 23 via advertising
Gross sales: $1642.26 (down 9% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1006.72 (down 13% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $52.98 (up 9% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $109.38— Justin Herbert rookie card /49 2020 Panini Dynagon green RC PSA 9 Chargers
Lowest price sold (net): $10.35 — Dre Greenlaw auto rookie card 2019 Panini Contenders college ticket RC 49ers
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Thanks so much! I had assumed (incorrectly) that these were discontinued a few years ago when USPS started consolidating and cutting services. I’m going to order a few packs and pile them on top of my stash of regional boxes.
I might need to adjust my shipping costs on items like this. Still figuring all that out as I build up little stashes of these random items.
I think you’re right that I would have issues with a multi-purchase customer, but I’ll cross that bridge if and when I come to it. It would be a good problem to have.
I have been thinking a lot about promoted listings lately. I have also decided to stick with a 5% rate. That is what has worked for me for the last year or two, so I haven’t really fiddled with it. Sometimes I will up that percentage to 7.5%, especially if it’s a bulkier item or something I have in quantity, but I’m not sure there is a meaningful difference in small PL percentages.
A few weeks ago, when I did end and sell similar to my store, I adjusted a lot of prices down and also adjusted PL down from 7.5% to 5%. I got a lot of sales from lower price in that first week, then it felt like a much slower week the following week. I wanted to blame promoted listings. Instead, I dug in my heels and listed almost twice the listings that I normally list. Surprise, surprise, my sales went back to “normal” — whatever that means during summer, and considering that my STRs are quite high by the nature of how selective I am with my eBay inventory.
If you’re going to decrease your promoted listings percentage, I would also plan to lower prices and, ideally, create a good amount of new listings shortly after. It makes sense to adjust these levels every summer, at least, when sales are naturally slower.
I think there is a massive difference in sales when you don’t use PL at all. Literally like an on/off switch. That’s anecdotal, from when I first started using PL a few years ago after never using it, as well as thinking about the boost in sales I get every time I end my slow listings, adjust them and sell similar. I can’t deny the consistency of those results.
Here’s an interesting thought — when does it make sense to add a promoted listings campaign to your listing? Right now, I always add my standard 5% campaign when I list the item. About half of my sales come from promoted listings, historically, and that has remained pretty consistent over the last couple years. I like this because then I don’t have to think about the listing again until I get an offer or it sells, or until it’s time for sell similar.
But with certain items that are rare and/or waiting for that perfect buyer, promoted listings might not be necessary. Or at least not until after 30 days, or 60, or whatever the number is. I’m probably going to stick with what’s been working for the rest of this year. But I’m open to changing my process in 2025 if there’s a better way.
8/18/2024 to 8/24/2024
Total listings: 347 (up from 338 last week)
New listings this week: 40
Items sold: 38 — 19 via best offer, 8 via seller initiated offer, 26 via advertising
Gross sales: $1759.64 (down 18% from one year ago)
Net sales: $1201.26 (down 10% from one year ago)
Average sales price: $46.31 (up 39% from one year ago)
Highest price sold (net): $121.53— Kyle Lowry NBA locker room nameplate from the 2018 All-Star Game
This is sports-adjacent, but not a card. I bought around six of these nameplates at the beginning of the year for $20 to $40 each. I took a while to get them listed, as I do with almost everything. I wasn’t sure about pricing, how to do the photos, or if they would sell. But I should trust my gut more. I’ve sold three of them for over $100 each. It becomes easier to take chances on buying items outside your comfort zone when you can look back at recent examples of how it paid off. Now if I can just find some more locker room nameplates from the All-Star Games…
Lowest price sold (net): $11.78 — Torry Holt 2023 Panini Mosaic silver prizm autograph
